‘They’re from the past,’ the Don said crisply.
‘I was getting around to that,’ Zachary told him.
Narranjerry was ignoring Zachary and speaking to the Don. ‘We’re all from the past. We come out of the past, live in the present, pass into the future.’ He smiled. ‘Or are always in the present, whichever way you like to put it?’
The Don was not a great man for metaphysical speculation. ‘They come from 90 years ago. Before the Slarn raid.’
Narranjerry nodded, as if satisfied with this answer. Zachary was amazed. He certainly would not have been satisfied with an improbable answer like that. He watched, puzzled, as Narranjerry moved back to his seat and sat down. ‘They made very good books and steel back then,’ the Old Man remarked casually.
Harold too was amazed. ‘Just like that? You believe we’re from the past?’
Naranjerry’s white-filmed eyes sought him out. ‘Why not?’ Narranjerry asked. ‘People move in space … why not in time? Is one more unlikely than the other?’
Yes, thought Zachary, one is one hell of a lot more unlikely than the other, but kept the observation to himself. After a time, they came off the salt again, and moved onto a dirt road rutted by cart tracks and bounded on each side by ti-trees. Meg was beginning to get a nagging feeling that she had been here before, that at some time she had been over this terrain, if not on wheels, then on horseback. When she saw the high stone house with the palm trees and steel windmill towers and vanes beyond it, she knew she had indeed been here before, and also when. The palm trees were much taller now, but, she thought, they had had 90 years to grow taller in. But to her sense of time, it had been only last summer that she had driven through these same gates with her father and mother. She felt she knew what was beyond the gates which even now were slowly being opened from the inside. There had been a garden with lawns, and beds bright with flowers, and a circular driveway, and beyond all this a house built of freestone with the corners groined in old rose-red brick, and the roof covered with mossy old slates. Her heart sank within her. It would be different now. The last time she had seen it, the barbered lawns had had sprinklers playing on them, and there had been ducks on a pond lying to one side of the house and overlooked by the billiard room and some of the upstairs bedrooms. Now, she knew, the grass would be rank and uncut, the house derelict, the flowerbeds turned into salt piles.
The gates opened and Zachary drove the bus inside. All of the starship’s crew gasped. Only Maze, and the Don and the other Trolls were not surprised, for they had seen it all before. Of all the starship crew, it was Meg who was the most surprised. For it had scarcely changed at all. The palm trees and the other trees were all taller, and some of the eucalypts she remembered were gone, grown old and died since she had been here last. Otherwise, everything was as it had been. Sprinklers played on barbered lawns, bright blooms filled the flower beds, and there were even ducks on the pond by the side of the house. ‘What is this place?’ Meg dimly heard Zoe asking Narranjerry. ‘My place,’ the Old Man replied.
‘I came here once,’ Meg heard herself saying, as if from a vast distance, ‘to a weekend houseparty. It belonged to Sir Reginald and Lady Foster.’
‘It belongs to me now,’ said Narranjerry. In the silence that followed, the bus ran out of fuel. They all sat in silence. Zachary did not even attempt to restart the bus. The fuel gauge was telling its own sad story. He became aware of someone leaning across him, someone dressed in white, who smelled of the sea. Narranjerry was peering at the fuel gauge. ‘Seems you’re out of gas,’ the Old Man said. They were looking at Narranjerry, all of them. The gates behind them were shut again, by whose hands they had not seen, so taken aback had they been by what was inside the walls of this strange place. Had they driven into a trap? Were they going to have to fight their way out again?
Narranjerry seemed to feel their stares boring into him, for he smiled before he turned to face them. ‘I won’t cheat you,’ he said. ‘You’ll get your salt. How you get it back to where you came from … that’s going to be your problem.’
Despite Narranjerry’s reassuring words, the starship crew took their Slarnstaffs with them as they got off the bus. They had come to realize that it was a dangerous world here in the future, and that private property only stayed that way if the owners kept their hands on it. Narranjerry seemed either not to notice, or not to mind the fact that they were carrying things which looked like weapons. He simply led the way up the gravelled drive, and onto the verandah of the house. As they reached the door, someone opened it from the inside, but stayed behind the door as they trooped down the wide, cool hall with its floor of worn black and white tiles.
At the end of the hall was a stairway which, Meg knew, led to the upper floor and what in the past had been the bedrooms, but Narranjerry took the first door on the right and led them through into what Meg remembered as the billiard room overlooking the duck pond. The billiard table still stood on its six heavy legs in the centre of the room. It had its wooden cover on it, concealing the green baize, but the netted string pockets could still be seen protruding at its corners and sides. On the wooden cover of the billiard table was arrayed a collection of swords and daggers of all kinds. Meg knew that they must have been taken from museums, and private collections and officers’ messes in military barracks. Her father had had a small collection of antique swords, and she knew the value of what she was seeing. In her time, such a collection of bladed weapons could only have been put together by a government-owned museum or a millionaire private collector.
Looking around, she now saw the major change which had been made to the room. Every wall had been shelved from floor to ceiling and every shelf had been crammed with books. More books were piled on chairs and on the floor. So this was the Old Man’s library! The Trolls, the Don, Ulf and Rocky, were drawn to the collection of daggers and swords on the table. Meg and Harold, moved by a similar compulsion, went directly to the bookshelves. Zachary and Zoe obeyed Narranjerry’s gesture of invitation and sat in two of the big leather armchairs which were part of the room’s original furnishings. Narranjerry looked at them with his milky eyes for a while before speaking. ‘From the past.’ He savored the idea. ‘You wouldn’t have a metallurgist among you?’
Harold looked up from the book he was dipping into. ‘I’m good at science.’
‘I could use a metallurgist,’ Narranjerry sighed.
There was silence again at this, and then Harold said: ‘I can’t find Zyglan in here.’
‘What’s Zyglan?’ Zoe thought that Harold always managed to ask the craziest of questions.
‘Some element Guinevere needs,’ Harold said and continued looking through the book.
During this exchange, Narranjerry had been looking at their Slarnstaffs. ‘You want to sell those things you’re carrying?’
‘No thanks,’ Zachary said. ‘They’re kinda useful.’
‘You know what they are?’
Zachary was about to lie, then thought better of it and nodded. ‘Uh huh.’
‘They’re Slarn.’
‘Uh huh.’
Meg was rapt in the amount and variety of knowledge she was finding on the bookshelves. Narranjerry had not collected just any books. You could take this library and rebuild civilization in under a century. She said as much.
‘You’d want to do it better,’ Harold said, ‘there were many inefficient aspects to our civilization before the Slarn came.’
Zachary could guess what those were. He had an uneasy feeling that guitar-playing drifters might have to disappear in Harold’s Utopia. He looked around the room. ‘I didn’t think anything like this still existed.’
‘You have to know your markets,’ Narranjerry told him. ‘Salt and good blades. There’s always a market for them.’
As if in answer, the Don hefted an old Museum-piece of a sword. Meg recognized it as a Scottish basket-hilted broadsword. Her father had had one. ‘Would you put this away for me?’ the Don asked Narranjerry.
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‘That’s worth a lot of books,’ Narranjerry replied.
‘You’ll have them.’ The Don dropped into an en garde position with the sword. He lunged, parried, and slashed. The invisible opponent was dispatched. He straightened again and looked at the sword. Love at first sight, thought Zachary.
A hammer smashed onto a red-hot blade in the making. They had at last met one of the Old Man’s helpers. This one was short and squat and so powerful was his neck that his head seemed to grow straight out of his shoulders. The strip of metal on his anvil had once been one of the leaf springs of their school bus, and now the small square man was working it into a blade. Watching him, Zoe realized that though the blacksmith at the village was a good tradesman, this man was something else, he was an artist. She was watching someone at work who knew precisely what he was doing to the point where the skill seemed almost casual. She watched in awe.
Zachary was watching in despair. ‘That’s a leaf spring,’ he said.
‘Sure thing,’ the smith said. ‘Make good blades.’
‘You were only supposed to take a two hundred pounds of the steel from the bus! If you’ve taken the leaf springs…’ Zachary’s eyes roamed around the workshop which had once been part of the stables attached to the house. There in one corner were piled the wheels of the bus. ‘You’ve taken the lot!’
‘Without fuel, where were you going to take it?’ asked Narranjerry.
‘We don’t have a bus any more,’ Zachary said to the others. ‘You realize that? The Salt King and his boys just dismantled our bus?’
‘No fuel, you’re not driving anywhere. We’ll pay you for the steel.’ Narranjerry looked at the smith. ‘What do we owe?’
‘Lotta crapmetal in it, say 800 poundweight,’ said the little smith, putting the half-formed blade back to heat.
‘There you are,’ Narranjerry said. ‘A fortune. Eight hundred poundweight of salt? The King of Vic hasn’t got that much!’
‘Great,’ said Zachary. ‘A fortune in salt and no way of getting it home. That’s just great.’
60: TROLLS DON’T WALK
In the garden of Narranjerry’s establishment, there was a summer house, a square structure with waist-high walls and columns supporting a roof of red tiles, with a terracotta dragon guarding each corner. Around the interior walls of the summer house were benches built into the structure itself. Leaves littered the tiled floor, and a spider had woven herself a residence between one column and the roof. It was to this place that they came for their council of war. Meg had memories of the summer house. She had sat here, talking away summer afternoons, sometimes with a group of friends, but on two occasions with a young man. His face rose in her memory, and she thrust the memory aside. If the Slarn had taken him, he was now far away beyond the stars; if he had escaped capture, he was long dead. It did not do to think too much of the people they had known so well just those few weeks ago.
‘We take the lot,’ the Don was saying. He looked around the group, his eyes resting momentarily on each of their faces, willing their cooperation.
Zachary threw up his hands. ‘We can’t carry eight hundred pounds of salt. There’s eight of us, that’s a hundred pounds average, and there’s some of us can’t carry that. We got women with us, Harold and Maze can’t carry that much…’
‘Certainly the women can’t,’ said Harold.
Meg looked at him hard. Harold knew that look. He used to get it in class when he had crossed the line between being a good student and being a know-it-all. ‘Can you carry a hundred pounds, Zachary?’ she asked.
‘Exactly what I’m saying,’ Zachary answered, poker-faced, ‘Some of us can’t carry that much.’
‘So it’s not just the women…’ Meg was beginning to say when Maze cut in.
‘The Don’s right. We take the lot.’ Maze, in an action curiously reminiscent of the Don’s, looked around the group, her gaze resting on each face. A skinny little child, she radiated for that moment the air of a leader.
Ulf agreed. ‘I can carry two hundred poundweight.’
‘Sure, Ulf, sure,’ said Zachary, and turned to the Don. ‘Can’t we come back for it?’
‘You don’t believe I can carry two hundred poundweight?’ Ulf roared, and surged to his feet and slung Zachary over one shoulder then Harold over the other.
‘I’ve never seriously doubted you could carry two hundred poundweight, Ulf,’ Zachary said in a tone designed to calm down berserk warriors or mad dogs, ‘it’s just that we could make two trips, uh? Is that too much to ask?’
The Don wished that just this once Zachary could understand the situation. ‘Zachary this is salt we’re talking about. Salt. If it were gold, I’d risk it, but this is salt.’
Ulf put Zachary and Harold down. ‘You got that in your head now Zach?’ Harold said, ‘Salt.’
The group in the summer house could be seen from the library window, and at this window stood a tall cloaked figure. Marlowe turned, and took off his wraparound shades, and looked at Narranjerry, who caught a flash of red from the metal eye as it turned from the light. ‘Did they tell you?’ Marlowe said, ‘That they come from before the Slarn invasion?’
Narranjerry smiled at his old friend. Both seekers after wisdom, they had known each other many years. Narranjerry could even remember Marlowe’s father. He too had been addicted to the search for wisdom. ‘They said so.’
‘They’re important to my quest,’ Marlowe said.
‘Quest,’ Narranjerry said, and shook his head. ‘I’ve been saying to you, friend Marlowe, for how long I can’t remember, that the past is gone…’
‘‘The future doesn’t exist yet’,’ Marlowe said, finishing his old friend’s perennial advice.
‘But they’re the two places you live. You’re always living in the dead past or the non-existent future. You never live in the present, and that’s the only time that exists.’
‘I have to live where I can,’ Marlowe said, and again looked out the window toward the group in the summer house. ‘I live for my quest, and my quest needs those thieves alive … for the moment.’
‘Your quest,’ Narranjerry echoed. ‘You’ve spent your life on it, walked and ridden thousands of empty miles, read libraries of books, talked to whole monasteries of sages … and what has it given you?’
Marlowe smiled. ‘You ask me that? Old Man Narranjerry, the Salt King, the Blade Seller, sitting among his books? You ask me what wisdom’s worth?’
‘Wisdom is one thing. But your wisdom’s yoked to a fool’s quest, my oldest friend. I weep for you. Lost in the past, lost in the future, never in the now.’
‘Save your tears for those who try and stop me,’ Marlowe said, staring out from the dimness of the library into the sunlight garden. In the summer house the boy from the starship had just leapt to his feet and was shouting something.
‘The horses!’ Harold shouted in his customary excitement at finding the solution to a puzzle. ‘We load the salt on the horses!’
Ulf looked at the boy, who was clearly another one who did not understand the first thing about life. ‘If we load the salt on the horses,’ he rumbled, ‘we will have no horses to ride.’
‘So we walk,’ Harold said, trying to keep from his voice the impatience he felt. Explaining things to Ulf sometimes felt like running in deep, sticky mud.
‘Trolls don’t walk,’ Ulf replied in a tone which admitted of no discussion whatsoever. He said it as one might say “the sky is blue” or “water doesn’t flow uphill”. He was stating an axiom, an indisputable law of physics. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, E=MC2, and Trolls don’t walk.
Harold did not understand that Ulf was stating a universal law. He thought Ulf was expressing a personal preference about modes of transport. ‘We can get back two hundred poundweight of salt for Guinevere,’ he carefully explained to Ulf, ‘but we can’t get back the other six hundred except by using the horses.’
‘Trolls don’t walk,’ Ulf explained with equ
al care to Harold. ‘Trolls have never walked. When Don Spider Costello the First led the Trolls into this land on their Harleysickles, they didn’t walk.’ He stood, his face red with anger. ‘We didn’t walk then, and we don’t walk now.’
The Don looked up at Ulf, and smiled. Zachary turned away from that smile. Zachary hated it when the Don smiled, because it always meant that something bad was about to happen, usually, in Zachary’s view, to Zachary. ‘Ulf,’ said the Don, smiling, ‘what do Trolls do for their Don?’
‘Whatever it takes,’ Ulf sighed, dimly knowing that he was about to be asked to do something against his honor.
‘And if your Don says that Trolls will walk?’
‘Trolls ask how far?’ Ulf muttered, in very subdued tones. Then he roared, ‘But only for salt! And only for the Don! And anyone says different I’ll hang him in his own guts!’ And he glared at Zachary and waited.
‘I’m not saying different,’ said Zachary. ‘In fact I agree with everything you say, ever have said, or ever will say in the future.’
‘Never thought you were that smart,’ said Ulf.
They set out at first light on the following day, the four horses, each loaded with two hundred poundweight bags of salt, led by Zoe, Maze, Harold and Rocky, while the Don and Meg walked in front, and Zachary and Ulf made up the rearguard. The sun rose on them as they traversed the salt flats, heading for the road that had brought them here. Already Narranjerry was out on the pans scooping salt, and they waved as they passed him.
‘Nice day for a walk, uh?’ Zachary said to Ulf, Ulf said not a word, merely glowering at the salt-laden horses and trudging on over the crunching salt crystals.
Narranjerry watched them go, and then looked toward his house. A lone horseman was setting out. Marlowe, it seemed, was travelling inland by another route.
61: TROLLS WALK
Back at the starship, the Looters were now well-advanced in their efforts at decorating Guinevere. While some of the Looters continued with the painting of her hull, the Eldest had sent others to Lootertown to collect the human skulls which had once been piled around the statue of Colonel Light. In the Eldest’s view, since Guinevere had devoured the statue of Dark One and therefore become Dark One herself, it was only right that she should have the skulls of Dark One’s former sacrifices to adorn her. Truth to tell, the Eldest never felt quite at home without some piles of human skulls about. Apart from their artistic merits as pure decoration, there was also their religious significance. To the Eldest, there was nothing quite so satisfying as the symbolism of the skull: the grinning jaws, symbolizing the moral law that all must eat and all must be eaten; and the empty brain case and fleshless cheeks symbolizing the food that all must eat and all must become.
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